RICHMOND — PG&E’s top boss suggested Monday that the utility’s beleaguered ratepayers may see monthly utility bills flatten out and someday even fall below their current levels.
In recent years, PG&E customers have seen monthly bills surge dramatically. But the utility titan is looking at ways to curb the increase, according to PG&E Chief Executive Officer Patricia Poppe.
“We see a future where customers’ bills can start to come down,” Poppe said in response to questions from this news organization about fast-rising ratepayer costs, after an event PG&E hosted in Richmond.
The surprising comment struck some reform advocates as too good to be true.
Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, a consumer group, was skeptical that PG&E will rein in the pace of monthly bill increases.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Toney said in an interview about Poppe’s comments. “The prices are so doggone high now they would need to come down significantly to make a difference and make them affordable.”
Oakland-based PG&E has said it hopes to bring prices closer to the inflation rate, or at least in the 4% to 5% range. For more than a year, however, PG&E’s monthly bills have been rising by more than 20% annually, or far above the company’s self-described targets, thanks to a series of approvals from the state Public Utilities Commission, which oversees the utility, for rate hikes.
“I find it very hard to believe PG&E, given that the company has a dozen rate increases currently in front of the PUC,” Toney said. “There are a host of proposals that will all impact customers.”
Poppe appeared Monday at an Earth Day CEO summit next to the headquarters of Moxion Power, a green technology company located at Ford Point along southern Richmond’s windswept shores.
“We are working very hard to modernize our methods for customers and make (monthly bills) more affordable,” Poppe said during the interview.
Some changes are already in place, according to Poppe.
“We have implemented a lean operating system to shave costs out of our system and improve the customer experience,” Poppe said.
Over the 12 months ending in January 2024, combined bills for a typical residential customer who receives electricity and gas services from PG&E averaged roughly $294.50 a month.
That was a 22.3% increase over the average monthly bill in January 2023. In sharp contrast, the Bay Area inflation rate rose 2.6% during 2023.
“We are re-thinking some mandates that are driving costs to be higher,” Poppe said.
Poppe pointed to safety mandates that in her view can be costly, such as heavy reliance on vegetation management to prevent wildfires.
“We think technologies have superseded vegetation management as a primary reducer of wildfire risk in our system,” Poppe said. “We think we can do less vegetation management. We’ll always have some. But we think we can do less. We can substitute lower-cost technologies for that to keep people safe and then build infrastructure that is resilient to the extreme weather that our customers are experiencing.”
PG&E also remains under scrutiny in the wake of a decade of PG&E-sparked disasters that included a fatal gas explosion that destroyed a San Bruno neighborhood as well as a string of infernos that torched huge swaths of land in wine country and other sections of Northern California.
“Our progress on safety has enabled us to look to the future and that’s what we’re doing,” Poppe said. “We are looking at adding additional battery storage. We have 1,600 megawatts of battery storage that we’re going to add by 2026. That’s an important part of a resilient and renewable grid.”
While the ambitious changes may seem at first glance tricky to implement, Poppe believes PG&E can find ways to make intricate cost controls, widening technology deployment while improving safety measures.
“All of these things can happen,” Poppe said. “We see prices falling in the future and we are working every day to make that happen.”